Love, leave me like the light,
    The gently passing day;
We would not know, but for the night,
    When it has slipped away.

Go quietly; a dream,
    When done, should leave no trace
That it has lived, except a gleam
    Across the dreamer's face.

A man who is probably my husband sails by. 
But I just see a sailboat, not who steers it. 
But I picture a man, in the gender of things. 

My husband who you will not meet.
He’s off, I don’t know, marshalling.
Ideas, not soldiers. Sailing helps him think. 

I used to join him. Then we argued.
For a decade we argued. And sometimes 
sailed, though I was admittedly mostly 

decorative, a mermaid on the prow. 
Whether I brought him better luck 
is not my weather to tell. I cost him. 

Time. He costs me. More.

*To gradually steal all the possessions out of a neighbour’s house by borrowing & not returning —Anjana Iyer

Your mother slaps a frenzy of honey on her plain soft bread
asking where the toaster’s gone & where’s her thieving daughter-in-law?

I stole her favorite cowboy boots & bought a ticket
for the rodeo. I watched the sun setting behind the bleachers

& held a cup of cold beer to my lips, unthinking of you.
Yes, I took your toaster & a set of tongs your hard-of-hearing

mother thought you said were her thongs & I laughed
at the impracticality before I took her wedding linen & monogrammed

bedding off the bed she’ll die in. When you lived in my house you ate
cake every day. You left cigarette burns in my cushions.

The yellowed newspaper clipping announcing our engagement, its picture of us
down by the river where we used to fool around?—I stole that too.

The bullhorns from their pens signaled disaster to anyone who knew the
signs. I stole the dirt shadowing the air. I stole the whole show.

I
    On ashes of old volcanoes
    I lie baking
    the deathward flesh in the sun.

    I can hear
    a door, far away,
    banging in the wind:

    Mole Street. Quai-aux-Fleurs. Françoise.
    Greta. “After Lunch” by Po Chu-I.
    “The Sunflower” by Blake.

2
    And yet I can rejoice
    that everything changes, that
    we go from life
    into life,

    and enter ourselves
    quaking
    like the tadpole, its time come, tumbling toward the slime.